by Angela Mentch

Created on: January 23, 2009

When I met my first husband I thought that it would be forever. We were in our early to mid twenties when we got married. I don't think we knew what we were in for.

We lived with his mother at first. It was tolerable for about a month and that was the beginning to the moving around from place to place. He found work where ever we went but it never lasted long. I know that the stress of the situation was hard on the both of us, it seemed like every other year we had to take a break from each other. I would go home to my parents and stay with them until I got my head on straight. I would do this two more times, not smart on my part. I would work things out with him, he was never abusive to me ever, just not sure of what his intentions were where our marriage was concerned.

I thought we were gonna finally settle on a place to raise a family and at first we did and daughter number one was born. It got back to where we didn't want things to go wrong and they did..we moved again,back to his mothers and then into a place of our own. Then daughter number two was born, he was working things were going well until another speed bump in our relationship reared it's ugly head and I went home to my parents for the final time. I raised my girls by myself and things were going great,until out of nowhere he came back one last time and tried to make things work.

I think that all couples have the same problem with finances. That was our biggest problem for the 8 years that we were married. I finally got the backbone to show him the door. My girls were 6 and 3, I didn't want to take their dad away from them and I did. When you don't want to help out financially with the children the best place for you to go is out the door. He left in 1994 we were divorce in 1995 and what came after that was nothing but a nightmare.

The day that we were in court I didn't want to make him out to be a bad father or husband. He provided when he needed to and he was a good dad when he needed to be dad. To me that was not enough, it was a full time job and I was the best mother that I needed to be to my girls.

I accommodated him when he had family plans,even if it wasn't his weekend. I was a very patient person with him when I could of thrown the book at him. I could never hate him, he's my daughter's father. We have been divorced for 13 years now and he has moved on with two more wives of which he is divorced from them and lives with his girlfriend out West now.

We have looked back at our 8 year marriage and have to wonder what went wrong. We know what happened and we have bothe learned from it and stay united for the girls. I see that the girls love their dad and they keep in touch with him as often as they can between e-mails and phone calls. If I could change that marriage I wold of done it differently. The two good things that came from this were my girls, and keeping our conversations mature and friendly.

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